Lately they've been staying profitable by using them to detain immigrants for offenses as small as having a busted rear light on their car. In any case, I was discussing the article with my partner and he totally doesn't buy that specific story, and I can see his point. There's too much about it that doesn't really line up too well. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if it had turned out to be true that someone, somewhere, was using the power of advertising as a means to keep private prisons filled for profit. The private prison system is just so messed up, given that it's profit driven.

What's really screwed up is that actually repairing existing prisons and abolishing overcrowding by transferring people to new facilities would also be a profitable business - but it'd be attacked as being soft on criminals.

Specifically, since CCA is one of the main sources of inmate housing for ICE, any legislation increasing illegal immigrant detention would boost CCA's stock dramatically.

This is one of my biggest complaints, when issues of "Big Government is the problem."

Yes, the Government has corruption issues (understatement), but privatizing public services, especially anything law enforcement related, raises even MORE corruption issues. When you make prisons for-profit, and reduce the pay and benefits of all the staff involved, reduce health services and food standards for inmates, the quality of life behind those walls is going to be terrible.

Evidence suggests that lower staff levels and training at private facilities may lead to increases in incidences of violence and escapes. A nationwide study found that assaults on guards by inmates were 49 percent more frequent in private prisons than in government-run prisons. The same study revealed that assaults on fellow inmates were 65 percent more frequent in private prisons.

The idea is that, up front, private prisons cost much less, causing states with budget issues to fire state employees, and contract out their inmate population to CCA, GEO and others. But at the end of the year, after the numbers are run for the cost of inmate vs. inmate and inmate vs. staff assaults, inmate death due to sub par medical care, and all the lawsuits from the victims' families, private prisons cost more in the long run.

That's why places like Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility are getting rid of companies like GEO, and in fact, the entire state of Missisippi is dumping the prison contractor because a Federal Judge says 'the youth prison "has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk",' and an investigator says "To have a prison that's chaotic, poorly run, dangerous, didn't provide services, highly sexualized and highly violent really limits the ability of the state to turn those folks around, and to ensure public safety upon their release from prison," Smith said.

So hopefully, after a couple decades of private prisons having their monopoly over the surplus of incarcerated adults and children, states are figuring out that prevention and rehabilitation are going to be cheaper, and actually more cost effective than giving a corporation ownership of these men, women & children. Because that's what a lot of private prisons do; they incarcerate people, give them a job paying from $.05-0.25/hr manufacturing goods, and selling them with the tag MADE IN AMERICA, and claiming that's rehab. It's not, and if it isn't slavery, it's at least indentured servitude.